Welcome to HauntForum.com -- Halloween and Haunting's Home on the Web!

You are currently viewing our site as a visitor which means certain areas of the site are not accessible to you such as our event calendar, chat room, photo galleries, vendor discounts and coupons and more. By joining our free community you will have access to all of these features as well as the ability to interact with one of the most vibrant online Halloween communities on the web. Registration only takes 1 minute and is absolutely free, so please join our community today!

If you are a registered member and have forgotten your password DO NOT REGISTER A NEW USERNAME! Please use the Password Reset Page to have a new password sent to your e-mail address.

If you have any difficulty registering or logging in, please contact us.

Technological TerrorFor the discussion of items of technology such as motors, controllers, motion sensors, audio boards etc. Also to discuss how to hack commercial electronic props.

First off let me appologize if this question has been posted before...

I have done a search and only could come up with ceiling fan motors. I have a small motor out of a small plug-in fan. It's one of the tall standing ones. It oscilates and rotates, but obviously rotates very fast. How can I slow this down? Any help would be appreciated, or a link to a past thread would help if there is one.

I spent a whole lotta time and money trying to slow down a ceiling fan without success. I tried dimmer switches, fan speed controls, etc, and only managed a very slight reduction. I'm not an electronics guru but I think the ability is either in the motor or it isn't. I finall gave up.

Most of those type fans use shaded pole single-phase induction motors.

You need to look for a speed control that uses a Triac to control the speed on them. Also you might want to run some tests and see how much heat is generated by the motor. Oscillating fans beat the heat by blowing air over the motor core as they work. If left uncooled, they can easily over-heat and burn up.

Some good info posted. Doc pretty much summed it up - the ability for speed control is basically built into the motor. Ceiling fans and some other small fans sometimes use a capacitor to vary speed. You might be able to vary the value of the capacitor to change speed a little. But the downside of fan motors is they have practically zero start-up torque and very little running torque. Then you usually loose some of that torque if you attempt to run at a lower speed.

So overall, using a fan motor to run anything mechanical usually doesn't work out too well. For a small prop, a small motor with a gearbox can get you down to a slow speed and boost the torque. DC permanent magnet motor (ie windshield wiper motor) with a PWM speed control driver can give you nearly full torque across a speed range of ~5 to 95% (and be completely variable speed as needed)

Thank you for your replies. I was going to use the spinning motor for a grave jumper or something along those lines and the oscillating motor, I'll probably stick a foam head on it and attach it to a torso and let it look back and forth on my porch. This isn't a ceiling fan motor, just a small stand-alone fan.